“Jane Goodall is an animal person,” my daughter announced after meeting the renowned chimpanzee expert at the Wildlife Conservation Expo in San Francisco last fall. “Yes….” (It seemed obvious enough.) “You don’t understand,” Kristina continued. (This is often true.) “So what’s an animal person?”
“You can tell animal people when you see them. They’re different from other people. You can tell by watching them. I’m glad that Jane Goodall is an animal person.”
“So what’s an animal person?”
It was either difficult for Kristina to explain or difficult for me to understand- maybe both. Here is my interpretation of her response. Animal people are intent and intense. Their moves are deliberate, and there is a kind of alert rawness to their being. Animals are not startled, and are neither defensive nor offensive when an animal person enters a space. Kristina’s response made me think about other kinds of people who embody a similar, obvious sense of being. People who have danced all of their lives seem strong, graceful and intentional. Cyclists move with a kind of cadence; their legs are lean and powerful. Sometimes I think the same way about frontier missionaries. To me, many of them look different than other missionaries. Their eyes are penetrating and their bodies seem acutely alive. At mission conferences, it is generally easy to spot them from across the room.
As Kristina continued to talk about the Wildlife Expo, my mind wandered to a subject I think about often- justice. I wondered if there was such a thing as a justice person, and whether one could pick a justice person out of a crowd. For one thing, I imagine that they can be identified by where they spend time. Just like animal people and frontier missionaries, they spend significant amounts of time in places that other people do not consider safe. Their jungles are the pavements where extreme poverty, homelessness, human trafficking, and other forms of abuse exist. Their own homes, if they have homes, are not their castles. It’s a choice.
It is also easy to spot a justice person by their friendships. They do not consider equality of social status as something to be grasped, but instead, they make themselves nothing, taking on the nature of servants. They eat humble food with humble people. If they happen to have a second coat, and someone else has none, they are not too worried about giving it away. One justice person I know walked home without shoes one day, and without a belt to hold up his pants another. No problem- he had other shoes and belts at his non-castle home.
There are all kinds of observable behaviors to watch for in justice people, too. Usually these are small things that you just have to watch for- so small, in fact, that the person’s left hand can hardly see what the right hand is doing. The middle class Caucasian woman holds the restaurant door open for the young, Hispanic man who washes dishes there, and is late for work. The traveling businessman chooses to eat at the small local restaurant, using his food budget to pay less for food and more for a gratuity. The young person with only a few items notices the older stranger with a half cartful of groceries in line at the checkout. She clearly has used up all of her steps for the day. Why not exchange places in line?
Justice people are characterized by all kinds of upside down decision making processes like these. It is as though they believed that the first should be last and the last should be first. Over and over again they give up power for the sake of love. I know only a few real justice people, and I am not even sure that I am a very good one myself, but thanks to Kristina, I think I know a little better how to spot them, and I know a little better how to become part of their league.
